There is a Star Trek: TNG episode where LaForge gets stranded in a planet with a romulan, which says to him that should he have been born a romulan he would never be allowed to develop/grow up, due to having his genetic defect in his eyes.

The logic behind was very similar to yours. I found it cruel when I watched it, and I still do, but it's hard to deny the benefits to society.

So Microsoft is not a Linux contributor but they have merely contributed code to the Linux kernel.

Right...

And enough to appear as one of the 20 biggest contributors.

Please, forget about this "oh, they MUST make Linux better on its own" mentality. As you said, Microsoft contributed to make it play nicer to their software... So what? Put yourself in their shoes: wouldn't you want your own software to be compatible?
Hell, if they contributed to fix the software controller in their espresso machines, it would still be valid.

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday April 08, 2011 @07:43AM
from the resistance-is-futile dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The president of Peru, Alan Garcia, decided to celebrate the 500,000th One Laptop Per Child XO laptop in that country in style, announcing orders for half a million more and 20,000 additional Lego education WeDo robot kits for public schools, bringing the total number of kits for distribution up to 92,000. The latest OLPC laptop, the XO-1.75, has the lowest power draw ever thanks to a Marvell Armada 600 ARM processor and runs Fedora GNU/Linux with dual desktops Sugar (in Spanish, Aymara, and Quechua) and GNOME. For the first time, the XOs will be manufactured locally; the previous 2 million, including the blue high school variant with grownup keyboard, were all made by Quanta Computer. Meanwhile, parallel development continues on the upcoming XO-3 tablet; OLPC's New Technologies director is exploring software paths including GTK3 for Sugar, Android and Chrome. I, for one, salute our new plastic Peruvian overlords."

mikejuk writes: Paul Baran, whose work in the 1960's helped create the technical underpinnings for the Arpanet, the government-sponsored precursor to today's Internet, died at his home in Palo Alto, California, on March 26, 2011.

rsmiller510 writes: "Today's IT pros have to deal with a myriad of software and hardware, physical and virtual, spanning geographical locations and it requires a system that lets you see across all of this complexity to get the big picture."

astroengine writes: "On Wednesday, the CMS Collaboration announced its first science results. But no Higgs boson has been detected, yet. Physicists have instead narrowed the search down, and with a 95 percent certainty, the Higgs does not have a mass range of between 144 and 207 GeV/c2. In this quantum search for a proverbial needle in a haystack, it helps if the haystack shrinks a little."